ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF IMMIGRATION
More and more immigration is an economic matter, a flow of men rather than of families, seeking gain rather than religious and political liberty. Those who bring anything but their hands are a very small and diminishing contingent. Most of the money the immigrant shows on landing has been supplied him for that purpose. In 1882, when the old immigration reached its height, the public domain was being carved up at a tremendous rate, and the home-seeker predominated. When the crest of the new immigration arrived, in 1907, a quarter of a century later, free land was gone forever, and the job-seeker predominated. Formerly the idea of wandering oversea sprang up naturally among the intelligent and restless; now the idea is sown broadcast by thousands of steamship agents and their runners. In the tavern, knee to knee with the yokels, sits the runner, and paints an El Dorado. The poor fellows will believe him if he tells them the trees of America bear golden leaves. When the "American fever" seizes upon the peasant, it is the obliging runner who suggests mortgaging his home for the passage-money or who finds a buyer for his cows.
Common laborers who have been in America are hired to go about among the peasants, flash money, clink glasses, and tell of the wonderful wages awaiting them. The decoy thus gets together a group who elect him leader and pay him so much per head to guide them to America. Little do the poor sheep suspect that their bell-wether is paid by the steamship agent for forming the group and by the employer to whom he delivers them. A forwarding business exists for sending penniless laborers to America as if they were commercial ware. Each leaves at home some relative under bonds that the laborer will within a year pay a certain sum as cost and profit of bringing him here, Parties, through-billed from their native village by a professional money-lender, are met at the right points by his confederates, coached in three lessons on what answers to make at Ellis Island, and delivered finally to the Pittsburgh "boarding-boss," or the Chicago saloon-keeper, who is recruiting labor on commission for a steel mill or a construction gang.
The emigration of 5,000 Rumanian Jews between January and August, 1900, was brought about by steamship agents, who created great excitement in Rumania by distributing glowing circulars about America. One authority stated to the Immigration Commission that two of the leading steamship lines had five or six thousand ticket-agents in Galicia alone, and that there was "a great hunt for emigrants" there. Selling steerage tickets to America is the chief occupation of large numbers of persons in Austria-Hungary, Greece and Russia, the main sources of undesirable aliens. In 1908 and 1909 the inflow and outflow of steerage-passengers through our ports amounted to about a million and a half a year. Allowing an average outlay of $50 a head, we have a movement furnishing $75,000,000 of annual business to the foreign railway and steamship companies. That a monster of this size grows dragon claws with which to defend itself goes without saying.
CHEAP LABOR A RAIN OF MANNA
Still, it is not as cargo that the immigrant yields his biggest dividends. But for him we could not have laid low so many forests, dug up so much mineral, set going so many factories, or built up such an export trade as we have. In most of the basic industries the new immigrants constitute at least half the labor force. Although millions have come in, there is no sign of supersaturation, no progressive growth of lack of employment. Somehow new mines have been opened and new mills started fast enough to swallow them up. Virtually all of them are at work and, what is more, at work in an efficient system under intelligent direction. Ivan produces much more than he did at home, consumes more, and, above all, makes more profit for his employer than the American he displaces. Thanks to him, we have bigger outputs, tonnages, trade-balances, fortunes, tips, and alimonies; also bigger slums, red-light districts, breweries, hospitals, and death-rates.
To the employer of unskilled labor this flow of aliens, many of them used to dirt floors, a vegetable diet, and child labor, and ignorant of underclothing, newspapers, and trade unions, is like a rain of manna. For, as regards foreign competitors, his own position is a Gibraltar. When the European sends his capital hither, he puts it into railroad securities yielding from four to seven per cent., thereby releasing American capital for investment in the enterprises that pay from ten to thirty per cent. The foreign capitalist dares not put up mill or refinery here, because he cannot well run such concerns at long range. He may not invade the American market with the products of his mill over there, because our tariff has been designed to prevent just that thing.
ENDLESS INFLOW OF THE NEEDIEST
Thus, so long as he stays in his home market, the American mill-owner is shielded from foreign competition, while the common labor he requires is cheapened for him by the endless inflow of the neediest meekest laborers to be found within the white race. If in time they become ambitious and demanding, there are plenty of "greenies" he can use to teach them a lesson. The "Hunkies" pay their "bit" to the foreman for the job, are driven through the twelve-hour day, and in time are scrapped with as little concern as one throws away a thread-worn bolt. One steel-mill superintendent received official notice to hire no man over thirty-five and keep no man over forty-five. A plate-mill which had experienced no technical improvement in ten years doubled its production per man by driving the workers. No wonder, then, that in the forty years the American capitalist has had Aladdin's lamp to rub, his profits from mill and steel works, from packing-house and glass factory, have created a sensational "prosperity," of which a constantly diminishing part leaks down to the wage-earners. Nevertheless, the system which allows the manufacturer to buy at a semi-European wage much of the labor that he converts into goods to sell at an American price has been maintained as "the protection of American labor"!
Sunday Group of Roumanian Steel Workers, Youngstown, O.
Sunday Roumanians, Youngstown, O.
THE NEW IMMIGRATION AND THE HIGH COST OF LIVING
Between 1900 and 1910, although population grew twenty-one per cent., the output of the ten principal crops of the country increased only nine per cent. Between 1899 and 1911 the value of the average acre's output of such crops increased seventy per cent., while its power to purchase the things the farmer buys was greater by forty-two per cent. There has been a general upheaval of prices, to be sure, but the price of farm produce has risen much faster and farther than the price of other commodities. This is "the high cost of living," and it is immigration that has made this imp shoot up faster in the United States than anywhere else.
As long as good land lasted, our Government stimulated agriculture by presenting a quarter-section to whoever would undertake to farm wild land. This bounty overdid farming, until, in the middle of the nineties, the cost of living had reached a minimum. With the ending of free land, the upward turn was bound to come, but the change was made more dramatic by the inpouring of ten millions of immigrants without the knowledge, the means, or the inclination to engage in farming. Among us there is one American white farmer for fourteen American whites, one Scandinavian farmer for eight Scandinavians, one German farmer for eleven Germans, one Irish farmer for forty Irish; but it takes 130 Poles, Hungarians, or Italians in this country to furnish one farmer. Failing to contribute their due quota to the production of food, these late-comers have ruptured the equilibrium between field and mill, and made the high cost of living a burning question. Just as the homestead policy overstimulated the growth of farms, the new immigration has overstimulated the growth of factories.
IMMIGRANTS AND AGRICULTURE
Nevertheless, certain of the South Europeans who are upon the soil have something to show American farmers facing the problems of intensive agriculture. Italians are teaching their neighbors how to extract three crops a year from a soil already nourishing orchard or vineyard. The Portuguese raise vegetables in their walnut groves, grow currants between the rows of trees in the orchard, and beans between the currant rows. They know how to prevent the splitting of their laden fruit-trees by inducing a living brace to grow between opposite branches. The blackbeetle problem they solve by planting tomato slips inclosed in paper. From the slopes looking out on the Adriatic the Dalmatian brings a horticultural cunning which the American fruit-grower should be eager to acquire.
The conversion of New Jersey barrens into berry farms, vineyards, and pepper fields, the reclamation of muck soil in western New York, which Americans were not willing to touch, the transmutation of wild Ozark lands into apples and peaches, are Italian exploits which constitute clear gain for the country. But there are other immigrant farmers whose labors count on the wrong side of the national ledger. Not a few Slav colonies are clearing and tilling land so poor or so steep that it ought never to have been brought under the plow. The soil they have deforested will presently wash into the rivers, leaving stripped rocky slopes to grin, like a Death's-head, in the landscape. The nation will have to pay for it, just as France paid for the reckless ax work that went on under the First Republic.
HELPING THE IMMIGRANT TO GET UPON THE SOIL
When confronted with the undeniable evils resulting from the crowding of old-world peasants into American slums and factories, the opponents of restriction urge that the trouble is with the distribution of the immigrants, there are not really too many of them, but they are congested in certain centers and industries. Then let the state or the nation take the immigrant in hand and settle him upon the soil, where there is room for him and where he yearns to be. Supply him with the best of information, guidance and supervision and lend him a little money until he has gotten upon his feet. Successful state colonization would, no doubt, restore the balance between agriculture and manufactures and prevent the heartbreaking waste and misery resulting from the present hap-hazard, catch-as-catch-can distribution of immigrants among American opportunities.
Two other consequences ought, however, to be evident; First, the policy would tend to use up the agricultural opportunities Americans may prefer to hold open for their children and grandchildren. Second, State help to the immigrant would furnish splendid advertising matter to the steamship companies endeavoring to fill more steerages and might soon swell the number of arrivals to a million and a half or two millions a year. If we wish to have more immigrants and to fill up this country in the briefest possible time, state colonization is just the way to go about it. On the other hand, once the volume of immigration has been brought under effective control, the policy of aiding the immigrant to get upon the land is heartily to be commended.
Photograph by Hine Courtesy of The Survey
The Unemployed—Middle of the Morning, Chicago
INDUSTRIAL DISPLACEMENT
The facts assembled by the Immigration Commission shatter the rosy theory that foreign labor is drawn into an industry only when native labor is not to be had. The Slavs and Magyars were introduced into Pennsylvania forty-odd years ago by mine-operators looking for more tractable miners. Agents were sent abroad to gather up labor, and frequently foreigners were brought in when a strike was on. The first instance seems to have occurred in Drifton in 1870, and resulted in the importation of two ship-loads of Hungarians. The process of replacing the too-demanding American, Welsh, and Irish miners with labor from Austria-Hungary went on so rapidly that by the middle of the nineties, the change was accomplished. In 1904, during a strike in the coal-fields near Birmingham, Alabama, many South Europeans were brought in. In 1908 "the larger companies imported a number of immigrants," so that the strike was broken and unionism destroyed in that region. In 1880, in the first strike in the coal-mines of Kansas, "the first immigrants from Italy were brought into the fields as strike-breakers."
Poles were introduced into South Cleveland in 1882 to replace strikers in the wire-mills. The meat-packing strike of 1904 in Chicago was broken with trainloads of negroes, Italians and Greeks. In 1883 the largest oil-refining company at Bayonne, New Jersey, "in order to break the strike among the Irish and American coopers, ... introduced great numbers of Slovaks, Ruthenians, and Poles." In 1887 a coal-dockers' strike was broken with Magyars, and in 1904 striking boiler-makers were replaced by Poles. The striking glass-workers in 1904 were beaten by the introduction of Slovaks, Italians, Poles and Magyars. During the 1907 strike in the iron-mines of northern Minnesota, "one of the larger companies imported large numbers of Montenegrins and other Southeastern races as strike-breakers, while a few of the smaller companies brought into the region a number of German-Austrians." "One mining company imported as many as 1300 of these strike-breakers."
The hejira of the English-speaking soft-coal miners shows what must happen when low-standard men undercut high-standard men. The miners of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, finding their unions wrecked and their lot growing worse under the floods of men from southern and eastern Europe, migrated in great numbers to the Middle West and the Southwest. But of late the coal-fields of the Middle West have been invaded by multitudes of Italians, Croatians, Poles, and Lithuanians, so that even here American and Americanized miners have their backs to the wall. As for the displaced trade-unionists who sought asylum in the mines of Oklahoma and Kansas, the pouring in of raw immigrants has weakened their bargaining power, and many have gone on to make a last stand in the mines of New Mexico and Colorado.
Each exodus left behind an inert element which accepted the harder conditions that came in with the immigrants, and a strong element that rose to better posts in the mines or in other occupations. As for the displaced, the Iliad of their woes has never been sung—the loss of homes, the shattering of hopes, the untimely setting to work of children, the struggle for a new foothold, and the turning of thousands of self-respecting men into day laborers, odd-job men, down-and-out-ers, and "hoboes."
IMMIGRANTS AND LABOR ORGANIZATIONS
The dramatic unionization of the garment industries in our large cities has misled the public as to the actual effect of recent immigration upon trade-unions. The fact is that the immigrants from the backward parts of Europe tend to weaken, if not to shatter, labor organizations in the fields they enter. They arrive needy and eager to get any work at almost any pay. Having had no industrial experience in the old country, they lack the trade-union idea. Without our speech, and often illiterate, they are very hard to reach and to bring into line. So far as they are transients, who are not staking their future on the industry, they are loath to pay union dues and to run the risk of having to strike. It is true that the labor organizer evangelizes the alien workers with his union gospel; but by the time one batch has been welded into a fighting force, another batch is on his hands. His work, like Penelope's web, is raveled out about as fast as it is woven. No wonder that in the cotton industry unionism has been wrecked, while, of the iron miners, less than two per cent. belong to unions. In 1901 the United States Steel Corporation's constituent companies signed agreements with two-thirds of their 125,000 workmen, among whom the English-speaking held a dominant place. Ten years later the company signed not a single agreement with its beaten mass of Slav-Latins. There was no union with which to sign. The organizing, organizable Americans had been deleted from the works. No wonder that organized labor demands restriction of immigration. While the inrush continues, the lines of labor will be weak, forming, breaking, and reforming in the face of the intrenchments of capital.
IMMIGRANTS AND WAGES
During the last fifteen years the flood of gold has brought in a spring-tide of prices. Since 1896 the retail cost to Americans of their fifteen principal articles of food has risen seventy per cent. Wages should have risen in like degree if the workman is to retain his old standard, to say nothing of keeping his place in a social procession which is continually mounting to higher economic levels. We know that by 1907 wages had risen twenty-eight per cent., while retail prices were rising twenty-six per cent. Evidently the working man was falling behind in the social procession. In the soft-coal field of Pennsylvania, where the Slav dominates, the coal-worker receives forty-two cents a day less than the coal-worker in the mines of the Middle West and Southwest, where he does not dominate. In meat-packing, iron and steel, cotton manufacture, and other foreignized industries the inertia of wages has been very marked. The presence of the immigrant has prevented a wage advance which otherwise must have occurred.
"Shack" of a Polish Iron Miner, Hibbing, Minn.
Cabin of an Austrian Iron Miner, Virginia, Minn.
What a college man saw in a copper-mine in the Southwest gives in a nutshell the logic of low wages.
The American miners, getting $2.75 a day, are abruptly displaced without a strike by a trainload of five hundred raw Italians brought in by the company and put to work at from $1.50 to $2 a day. For the Americans there is nothing to do but to "go down the road." At first the Italians live on bread and beer, never wash, wear the same filthy clothes night and day, and are despised. After two or three years they want to live better, wear decent clothes, and be respected. They ask for more wages, the bosses bring in another trainload from the steerage, and the partly Americanized Italians follow the American miners "down the road." No wonder that the estimate of government experts as to the number of our floating casual laborers ranges up to five millions!
IMMIGRANTS AND CONDITIONS OF WORK
"The best we get in the mill now is greenhorns," said the superintendent of a tube mill. "When they first come, they put their heart into it and give a full day's work. But after a while they begin to shirk and do as little as they dare." It is during this early innocence that the immigrant accepts conditions he ought to spurn. This same mill had to break up the practice of selling jobs by foremen. In one concern the boss who sold a job would dismiss the man after a fortnight and sell the job again, while another boss in the same works would take on the dismissed man for a fee. On the Great Northern Railroad the bosses mulcted each Greek laborer a dollar a month for "interpreter." The "bird of passage," who comes here to get ahead rather than to live, not only accepts, the seven-day week and the twelve-hour day, but often demands them. Big earnings blind him to the physiological cost of overwork. It is the American or the half-Americanized foreigner who rebels against the eighty-four-hour schedule.
When capital plays lord of the manor, the Old World furnishes the serfs. In some coal districts of West Virginia the land, streets, paths, roads, the miners' cabins, the store, the school, and the church are all owned and controlled by the coal company. The company pays the teacher, and no priest or clergyman objectionable to it may remain on its domain. One may not step off the railroad's right of way, pass through the streets, visit mine or cabin, without permission. There is no place where miners meeting to discuss their grievances may not be dispersed as trespassers. Any miner who talks against his boss or complains of conditions is promptly dismissed, and ejected from the 35,000 acres of company land. Hired sluggers, known as the "wrecking-gang," beat up or even murder the organizer who tries to reach the miners. No saloon, gambling-hall, or bawdy-house is tolerated on company land. Even the beer wagon may not deliver beer at houses to which the superintendent objects.
It is needless to add that the miners are all negroes or foreigners.
IS THE FOREIGNER INDISPENSABLE?
After an industry has been foreignized, the notion becomes fixed in the minds of the bosses that without the immigrants the industry would come to a standstill.
"If is wasn't for the Slavs," say the superintendents of the Mesaba Mines, "we couldn't get out this ore at all, and Pittsburgh would be smokeless. You can't get an American to work here unless he runs a locomotive or a steam-shovel. We've tried it; brought 'em in, carloads at a time, and they left."
"Wouldn't they stay for three dollars a day?" I suggested, "even if two dollars and ten cents isn't enough?"
"No, it's not a matter of pay. Somehow Americans nowadays aren't any good for hard or dirty work."
Hard work! And I think of Americans I have seen in that last asylum of the native born, the Far West, slaving with ax and hook, hewing logs for a cabin, ripping out boulders for a road, digging irrigation-ditches, drilling the granite, or timbering the drift—Americans shying at open-pit, steam-shovel mining!
The secret is that with the insweep of the unintelligible bunk-house foreigner there grows up a driving and cursing of labor which no self-respecting American will endure. Nor can he bear to be despised as the foreigner is. It is not the work or the pay that he minds, but the stigma. This is why, when a labor force has come to be mostly Slav, it will soon be all Slav. But if the supply of raw Slavs were cut off, the standards and status of the laborers would rise, and the Americans would come into the industry.
Some bosses argue for a continuous supply of green foreigners because the sons of the immigrants are "above their fathers' jobs." A strange industry this! Britain's iron industry is manned by Britons, Germany's by Germans, but we are to believe that America's iron industry is an exotic which can attract neither native Americans nor the sons of immigrants. The truth is that the school and other civilizing agencies have turned Michael's boy not against hard work, but against the contempt with which his father's kind of work is tainted. But for the endless stream of transients with their pigsty mode of life, their brawls and their animal pleasures, the stigma on the work would vanish, and the son of the immigrant would be willing to inherit his father's job.
Photograph by Burke & Atwell. Courtesy of The Survey
Immigrant Girls Coming to Work in the Early Morning at the Union Stockyards
Photograph by Townsend. Courtesy of The Survey
Polish Girls Washing Dishes under the Sidewalk in a Chicago Restaurant. The only Light is Artificial
IMMIGRANT WOMEN DOING MEN'S WORK
While millions of women are being drawn from the home into industry, the popular ideal of womanhood serves as a precious safeguard, turning them away from coarsening occupations which might rob them of health or youth or refinement. But this ideal, which is higher among the American working-men than among the workers of any other people, is menaced by the new immigrants, with their peasant notions of womanhood. The Slavs and the Italians are not in the least queasy about putting their women into heavy and dirty work, such as core-making, glass-grinding, and hide-scraping, which self-respecting American girls will not touch. The employer realizes this, and continually tries these women in male occupations, with the object of substituting them for men, beating down men's wages or breaking a men's strike. Engaging in such masculine work not only prevents immigrant women from rising to the American woman's sense of self-respect, but it hinders their men from developing the American man's spirit of chivalry. What is more, the extension of woman's sphere on the wrong side underlines the native standard of womanliness, so that native girls are perhaps being drawn into work that denies them refinement and romance.
WHAT BECOMES OF DISPLACED AMERICANS
Does the man the immigrant displaces rise or sink? The theory that the immigrant pushes him up is not without some color of truth. In Cleveland the American, German, and Bohemian iron-mill workers displaced within the last fifteen years seem to have been reabsorbed into other growing industries. They are engineers and firemen, bricklayers, carpenters, slaters, structural iron-workers, steam-fitters, plumbers and printers. Leaving pick and wheelbarrow to Italian and Slav, the Irish are now meter-readers, wire-stringers, conductors, motormen, porters, janitors, caretakers, night-watchmen, and elevator-men. I find no sign that either the displaced workman or his sons have suffered from the advent of Pole and Magyar. Some may have migrated, but certainly those left have easier work and better pay. It is as though the alien tide had passed beneath them and lifted them up. On the other hand, in Pittsburgh and vicinity the new immigration has been like a flood sweeping away the jobs, homes, and standards of great numbers, and obliging them to save themselves by accepting poorer occupations or fleeing to the West. The cause of the difference is that Pittsburgh held to the basic industries, while in Cleveland numerous high-grade manufactures started up which absorbed the displaced workmen into the upper part of their labor force.
OUR STANDARD OF LIVING CRUMBLES
Unless there is some such collateral growth of skill-demanding industries, the new immigrants bring disaster to many of the working-men they undercut. The expansion of the industry will create some good jobs, but not enough to reabsorb the Americans displaced. Thus in the iron-ore-mines of Minnesota, out of seventy-five men kept busy by one steam-shovel, only thirteen get $2.50 a day or more, and $2.50 is the least that will maintain a family on the American standard. It is plain that the advent of sixty-two cheap immigrants might displace sixty-two Americans or Irish, while the setting up of an additional steam shovel would create only thirteen decent-wage jobs for them. Scarcely any industry can grow fast enough to reabsorb into skilled or semi-skilled positions the displaced workmen.
Employers observe a tendency for employment to become more fluctuating and seasonal because of access to an elastic supply of aliens, without family or local attachments, ready to go anywhere or do anything. In certain centers, immigrant laborers form, as it were, visible living pools from which the employer can dip as he needs. Why should he smooth out his work evenly through the year in order to keep a labor force composed of family men with local roots when he can always take on "ginnies" without trouble and drop them without compunction? Railroad shops are coming to hire and to "fire" men as they need them instead of relying on the experienced regular employees. In a concern with 30,000 employees, the rate of change is a hundred per cent. a year, and is increasing! Labor leaders notice that employment is becoming more fluctuating, there are fewer steady jobs, and the proportion of men who are justified in founding a home constantly diminishes.
IMMIGRATION AND CRISES
The fact that during an acute industrial depression in this country the immigrant stream not only runs low, but the departures may exceed the arrivals (as in the eight months following the 1907 panic, when there was a decrease of 124,124 in our alien population), has been made the foundation for the argument that surplus immigrant labor, by promptly taking itself off when times are bad here, relieves the labor market and hastens the return to normal conditions. It is overlooked that only the prosperous go, leaving upon us the burden of the weak unemployed aliens. Moreover, at the first sign of returning prosperity, a freshet of immigrants starts up, thereby checking sharply the good-times tendency toward higher wages and better working conditions.
THE RISE OF SOCIAL PRESSURE
Free land, coupled with high individual efficiency, has made this country a low-pressure area. It ought to remain such, because individualistic democracy forbids a blind animal-like increase of numbers. By causing the population to accommodate itself to opportunities, our democracy solves the Sphinx's riddle and opens a bright prospect of continuous social progress. But of late that prospect has been clouded. The streaming in from the backward lands is sensibly converting this country from a low-pressure area into a high-pressure area. It is nearly a generation since the stress, registered in the labor-market, caused the British working-man to fight shy of America. It is twenty years since it reached the point at which the German working-man, already on the up-grade at home, ceased to be drawn to America. As the saturation of our labor-market by cheaper and ever cheaper human beings raises the pressure-gage, we fail to attract as of yore such peoples as the North Italians and the Magyars.
Roumanian Shepherds in Native Costume, Ellis Island
In 1898 few came to us from east of Hungary. Now we are receiving them from Asiatic Turkey, Circassia, Syria, and Arabia. An immigration has started up from Persia, and conditions are ripe for a heavy influx from western Asia. These remote regions, which have had only twilight from Europe's forenoon, are high-pressure areas. Their peoples are too many in relation to the opportunities they know how to use. Until education, democratic ideas, and the elevation of women restrict their increase, or machine industry widens their opportunities, these regions will continue to produce a surplus of people, which the enterprising avarice of steamship companies will make ever more mobile and more threatening to the wage-earners of an advanced country. Only lately comes the announcement that one of the trans-Atlantic lines is about to run its steamships through the Dardanelles and Bosphorus into Black Sea ports in order to bring immigrants direct to America from southeastern Europe without the expense of the long haul overland to Hamburg.
If an air-chamber be successively connected by pipes with a large number of tanks of compressed air, the pressure within the chamber must rise. Similarly, if a low-pressure society be connected by cheap steam-transportation with several high-pressure societies, and allows them freely to discharge into it their surplus population, the pressure in that society must rise. But for Chinese exclusion we should by this time have six or eight million Celestials in the far West, and mud villages and bamboo huts would fill the noble valleys of California. Something like this must occur as we go on draining away surplus people from larger and larger areas of high-pressure.
Immigration raises the pressure-gage at once for laborers, but only gradually for other classes. It is the children of the immigrants who communicate the pressure to all social levels. The investor, landowner, or contractor profits by the coming in of bare-handed men, and can well afford to preach world-wide brotherhood. The professional man, sitting secure above the arena of struggle, can nobly rebuke narrowness and race hatred. Throughout our comfortable classes one finds high-sounding humanitarianism and facile lip-sympathy for immigrants coexisting with heartless indifference to what depressive immigration is doing and will do to American wage-earners and their children. If the stream of immigration included capitalists with funds, merchants ready to invade all lines of business, lawyers, doctors, engineers, and professors qualified to compete immediately with our professional men, even judges and officials able to lure votes away from our own candidates for office, the pressure would be felt all along the line, and there might be something heroic in these groups standing for the equal right of all races to American opportunities. But since actually the brunt is borne by labor, it is easy for the shielded to indulge in generous views on the subject of immigration.